Well, things have chilled out significantly. Thank goodness.
M´s mom got back out of the hospital, and SHE CAME TO CHURCH!!! We were calling her Sunday morning, and she didn´t answer, so we were worried that she wasn´t coming, but then we went to her house and she was at the door with her skirt on about to walk out! It was awesome!
Everyone else is still doing pretty well. We´re feeling really good about the people we have right now and are learning a lot about how to help individuals.
Some tender mercies this week: we were walking past a bar (don´t freak out, bars in Spain are totally harmless) and this guy started to speak with us in English about God. He was young, probably about 25. He told us that he wanted to talk to us another day and that he owned the bar and he would love for us to come by. So the next day we came by with a less-active member, and they told us that they wanted to give a discount for us to come and teach lessons there! It was awesome! We already took one investigator there, and we´re going to take the elders, and we´re going to start teaching this guy and his friend!
Another one: we were walking down the street and a car pulls up and stops right next to us. The door opens and out climbs our investigator Oscar, who we hadn´t seen for a while. We said hi to him, asked him if he had a few minutes, and taught him a lesson! It was so cool!
Keep your prayers coming, we need them! We´re doing well here and we´re both really happy with everything. Transfers are this next week but I HIGHLY doubt any of us will change.
Have a great week!
Hermana Lara Schaumann
March 31--My Comp Got Kissed by Jesus
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| At the entryway into Toledo, the former capital of Spain |
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| An old church in Toledo |
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| a castle near Toledo |
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| Toledo |
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| Looking out over Toledo |
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| Queen of the world! |
So first off, things are going decently well...people are more or less starting to progress...so we´ll see.
our highlights of this week were getting to go to an easter play of one of our investigators. It was really good, mostly sticking to the Bible, until after Christ was resurrected and the first person he appeared to was his mother Mary??? (la Virgen María) and then it ended with Jesus appearing to the disciples, like it is in the Bible, but then when he left, they all started to pray to Mary.
Afterwards our investigator invited us to the cast party, which we basically crashed, because we were the only non-cast people there, and the actor for Jesus came up to Hna. F and gave her besos before she could react. (I don´t know if I´ve explained this before, but in Spain, everyone greets each other with besos, or a kiss on each cheek. As missionaries, we´re allowed to do it with women, but not with men.) usually we can avoid it, but he just came too quick. So now we´ve been telling everyone that she got kissed by Jesus. :)
We´ve also been visiting a lot of Muslim women, and we can´t exactly teach them straight out, but we can share a lot of principles of the gospel and it´s really awesome. Yesterday we went to visit one women named Hassnae, and when we got there she had invited her neighbor M
(a SPANIARD!!) to come and had made us A TON of DELICIOUS Moroccan food. Their desserts in that country are probably the best desserts I have ever eaten in my life. We talked about so many principles of the gospel and ate a ton and at the end, they DID NOT want us to leave, and we didn´t want to leave either but we had to get home on time. We almost had a kick ourselves out of their house because they kept following us and talking to us. It was awesome.
So yeah, that´s the fun stuff for the week. I´ll get some pics of Toledo out for you. :)
Hna. Lara Schaumann
April 7--From Trashy to Classy
In a rather dramatic change from the trash strikes and daily riots every morning in the city center, the Ayuntamiento (Town Hall) has now begun to play classical music in the mornings. We´re supposing that they´re trying to convey an atmosphere of peace and cleanliness, although the true motives are sure to be revealed in the near future.
This week was pretty good, kind of slow-ísh...basically I´m still on a conference high and I don´t remember anything that happened before conference...
We did have another of our Muslim friends/investigators come to Conference with us yesterday, which is a huge deal because it´s about an hour away in train and metro to get to the stake center, which is where they were showing the broadcast. And he said he liked it! So maybe we can get him to come to church this week. :)
Since I literally remember nothing that happened before Saturday, I´m just going to talk about conference.
We were lucky to get to watch it in English, and we got to see almost all of the sessions. We got there late to the Women´s session, so we´ll have to watch it with our investigators later, but we saw both Saturday sessions and the Sunday Morning session. (And we´re totally watching the Sunday Evening session in district meeting on Wednesday!) I don´t know what themes you all saw in the talks, but I felt like almost every single speaker talked about covenants. I especially loved Elder Bednar´s talk because I felt like he explained perfectly the connection between covenants and the Atonement. As missionaries, we are trying so hard to help people feel the blessings of the Atonement and to apply it in their lives. And, as Elder Bednar explained, the only way to do that is to make covenants with our Heavenly Father and "yoke" ourselves to Jesus Christ. My favorite thing about Elder Bednar´s talk was not anything he said, but his love and desire, almost desperation, to have us understand the importance of the Atonement in our lives. As a missionary, I have relied many times on that grace, that enabling power of the Atonement. It truly is not something just for sinners or failures. It´s for the best of us just as much as it is for the worst of us. It truly helps us to overcome every weakness or failing we could possibly face. And the way to apply it is through covenants. It´s through raising our expectations of what we´re capable of doing, and creating a need to depend on our Savior´s atoning grace. I´m so grateful for the covenants I have made and the chance that I have to renew them every week.
I didn´t have time to talk about this last week, but we finally got to go to the temple, and it was WONDERFUL. I learned so much from being there, and especially from being there as a missionary. I was able to receive answers for my investigators and to understand better the necessity of repentance and of feeling the consequences of our sins. It was wonderful to understand and feel more of the love our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ have for us, and the reality of their great plan of salvation.
Then last Sunday we had a bunch of problems and we were running here and there to pick up our investigators and bring them to church, and we ended up running late. We went running up the street to try and make sure we got to take the sacrament, but when we got there, the door was closed and we could see that they were passing around the bread. Now, Spain is not like the U.S. where you can wait in the foyer and some cute litttle deacon will come out and bring the sacrament to you. If you get there even during the prayer, that door is shut and they won´t let you in until they´ve finished the sacrament. So we had to wait outside, helpless, until they let us in. We sat down and I felt AWFUL. We had been late for a good cause (trying to help our investigators!) but Iwe had missed the most important ordinance there is. I almost started to cry when I realized that the next week was General Conference and I wouldn´t be able to take the sacrament then either. I sat through the rest of Sacrament Meeting feeling horrible and then, at the end, the branch president came and found us and invited us to come up and take the sacrament. It felt SO GOOD. It was such an incredible experience to realize how important that ordinance is to us and the power it has to truly renew our strength and our convenants to the Lord.
Also, another thing I learned this week: Satan DOES NOT want us to go to conference. On Saturday morning before the session started we stopped by to visit an investigator and her crazy Catholic friend was there. She started talking and talking and talking about how Mary is our Heavenly Mother and how if we don´t pray to her, she´s going to get offended, and we´re ungrateful for not recognizing her power to save us. (I can listen to doctrines that aren´t true normally and be just fine, but this one made me feel physically SICK. I felt AWFUL the whole time she was talking about Mary like that.) But anyway, as she was talking, unbeknownst to me, my watch battery was dying, and I totally thought we had more time than we did, so we stayed after she left to eat with our investigator and her family. While we´re sitting there, the phone went off and I looked at the time on the phone and we were already late to meet the members we were going to travel with to go to conference. So we had to go RUNNING out of her house and to the chapel, and then to the metro where we needed to buy our monthly passes for April. As we go to buy them, my companion gets hers out of the machine just fine, but then mine gives me the receipt but not the actual pass. So we had to call the security guy over, he had to open up the machine and inspect it, then he had to make me fill out an official complaint form with my ID and everything. (At this point we´re running about an hour late.) Then we go running up the escalator to catch the train and my companion falls and drops all her stuff and gets all scratched up. But, we made it to conference and we were spiritually strengthened. Haha. Take that, Satan!
Nothing much else of great interest. We´re doing well and the weather has been fabulous the last few days!
Happy Conference weekend to all!
Hermana Lara Schaumann
1. Here´s a cool picture I took of the temple in between sessions of conference. :)
